“Alas! must it ever be so? Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go, And fight our own shadows forever?” – Lord Lytton

You thought it was all the Republicans, didn’t you? All the domestic spying? Alas, Democrats are way on board with this one too. House Democrats are proposing to have it permanently put in place as long as there is oversight.
Don’t get me wrong. This bill is way better than the so-called temporary action where telecommunication companies are given immunity to spying domestically, and there’s a whole bunch of other types of anti-privacy acts that would make privacy activists mutter unholy things. But the whole permanent part of it? That’s no so cool.
As a citizen of what is supposed to be the “land of the free”, I don’t expect people to be looking over my shoulder for whatever reason, even if there is oversight. To tell you the truth, the oversight part is really part of the issue that makes it bad. Everyone knows that governmental oversight is less than spectacular. Even my favorite agency, GAO, has no power over what they tell other agencies to do when other agencies fail to meet government set standards.
If there was more of something like an Inspector General or independent oversight, then I would feel a little bit better about it. Someone with enough umph to actually make sure that people’s rights’ were not violated and that it wasn’t free reign to go snoop in citizens’ things when there wasn’t a good reason to do so.
Just goes to show that when it comes to wording of things, generics could really hurt Americans in the long run because of legalese. We must be careful and not look at politicians as Republicans and Democrats, since they are all politicians, and politicians at the federal level have a sneaky way of fighting for special interest groups more so than the constituents they represent.